Faulty translations misled Beijing’s sea claims (1)

For decades Beijing’s communist rulers have been feeding the Chinese hoodoo history. They preach in schools that China has owned the islands, rocks, reefs, and waters of the South China Sea since time immemorial. “Abundant historical facts” supposedly back this up.

Yet genuine accounts from 6,000 years ago to the present disprove Beijing’s propaganda. Records tell of the sea being a migration and trade route, as well as fishing and piracy zone, of Southeast Asians (see Gotcha, 4, 6, and 8 Aug. 2014). China’s rich history depicts it as a land power dependent on agriculture. Admiral Zheng He’s voyages came several thousand years after the Malay conquest of Madagascar, off Africa across the Indian Ocean.

Maps are historical facts. Ancient maps of the Philippines and Southeast Asia have always shown Scarborough Shoal to be part of Luzon (Gotcha, 27 and 29 Oct. 2014). This debunks Beijing’s basis to invade the seamark that has been Filipino fishing grounds for centuries.

Too, ancient maps of China since the Song Dynasty do not include the South China Sea. China’s five Constitutions and diplomatic declarations state Hainan island-province to be its southernmost territory (Gotcha, 22 and 24 Oct. 2014). This negates Beijing’s contrived “9-dashed line” to annex the whole sea, including the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

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 Under that 9-dashed line, Beijing claims as its southernmost border James Shoal, 50 nautical miles off Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia. James Shoal is 22 meters underwater, entirely within Malaysia’s 200-mile EEZ yet more than 950 miles from China.

Absurdly, a fully submerged reef is China’s southernmost limit. How can that be? Noted British journalist Bill Hayton researched the issue, published in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on Feb. 9, 2013. Excerpts:

“How did the Chinese state come to regard this obscure feature, so far from home, as its southernmost point? I’ve been researching the question for some time while writing a book on the South China Sea. The most likely answer seems to be that it was probably the result of a translation error.

“In the 1930s China was engulfed in waves of nationalist anxiety. The predation of the Western powers and imperial Japan, and the inability of the Republic of China to do anything meaningful to stop them, caused anger both in the streets and the corridors of power. In 1933 the republic created the ‘Inspection Committee for Land and Water Maps’ to formally list, describe and map every part of Chinese territory. It was an attempt to assert sovereignty over the republic’s vast territory.

“The major problem facing the committee, at least in the South China Sea, was that it had no means of actually surveying any of the features it wanted to claim. Instead, the committee simply copied the existing British charts and changed the names of the islands to make them sound Chinese. We know they did this because the committee’s map included about 20 mistakes that appeared on the British map — features that in later, better surveys were found not to actually exist.

“The committee gave some of the Spratly islands Chinese names. North Danger Reef became Beixian (the Chinese translation of ‘north danger’), Antelope Reef became Lingyang (the Chinese word for antelope). Other names were just transliterated so, for example, Spratly Island became Sipulateli, and James Shoal became Zengmu. And this seems to be where the mistakes crept in.

“But how to translate ‘shoal’? It’s a nautical word meaning an area of shallow sea where waves ‘shoal’ up. Sailors would see a strange area of choppy water in the middle of the ocean and know the area was shallow and therefore dangerous. James Shoal is one of many similar features in the Spratlys.

“But the committee didn’t seem to understand this obscure English term because they translated ‘shoal’ as ‘tan’ — the Chinese word for beach or sandbank — a feature which is usually above water. The committee, never having visited the area, seems to have declared James Shoal/Zengmu Tan to be a piece of land and therefore a piece of China.”

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Beijing leaders and cartographers claimed James Shoal as China’s southernmost edge without seeing it. That is the conclusion of Supreme Court Senior Justice Antonio T. Carpio in his own studies of the matter.

Says Carpio: “Surely no Chinese could have gone ashore to ‘visit’ James Shoal. [It] is the only national border in the world that is fully submerged and beyond the territorial sea of the claimant state.”

Yet today when Chinese naval vessels come to inspect, they would drop to the bottom of James Shoal cement and steel markers. “Of course, this is blatantly contrary to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” Carpio says. “UNCLOS prohibits any state from appropriating submerged features beyond its territorial sea. Not even Malaysia, whose coastline is just 50 miles away, can claim James Shoal as sovereign territory.” (For more of Justice Carpio’s researches, visit: www.imoa.ph)

Hayton is coming out this year with his book “Spratlys: Dangerous Grounds.” It will detail how China invented its 9-dashed line claim, to include as well Macclesfield Bank and Scarborough Shoal.

 (To be continued)

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